Major Spoilers Question Of The Day: Your Preferred Mentor Edition

With Star Wars day approaching, I’m reminded of one of the bizarre bits of Star Wars lore that nobody likes to talk about: The fact that Yoda only trains Luke in the ways of the Jedi for about a day and half, at most. Of course, after his immediate conversion to the ways of the Force in ‘Star Wars’, one could make the case that Luke was a natural force-user (Let’s please not discuss Midichlorians because of all the unpleasant implications), or that Yoda in his dotage was an excellent tutor, but it does make one wonder if the majority of Jedi Academy didn’t consist of political science courses and proper matters of diplomacy in the galaxy. Of course, it’s not the first time that someone unrealistically picked up a skill immediately, as many a father-figure has imparted great wisdom and a whole new lease on life just in time for the big third act twist. Hell, Commander Spock in JJ Abrams ‘Star Trek’ reboot got to take instruction from his own older self in a moment that threatened to break the timestream AND the fanbase in two, which leads us to today’s query…

The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) would be hard-pressed to choose between R.J. Brande (because of his super-kabrillionaire deep pockets) and Bill & Ted’s future advisor Rufus (because Carlin), asking: If you could choose your own mentor from any of the worlds of pop culture, whom would you choose and why?

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The Author

Matthew Peterson

Once upon a time, there was a young nerd from the Midwest, who loved Matter-Eater Lad and the McKenzie Brothers... If pop culture were a maze, Matthew would be the Minotaur at its center. Were it a mall, he'd be the Food Court. Were it a parking lot, he’d be the distant Cart Corral where the weird kids gather to smoke, but that’s not important right now... Matthew enjoys body surfing (so long as the bodies are fresh), writing in the third person, and dark-eyed women. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: Fear! Surprise! Ruthless efficiency! An almost fanatical devotion to pop culture!

7 Comments

The two mac-daddies of Jersey: Jay and Silent Bob! They’re fun, they’re wild, they have a good time and they drop some good advice on you! They do drugs and in the end they get clean and buy their buddies the Quik-Stop. Nice dudes, fun men, positive role models!

But as Peter showed us on “Family Guy” when he wanted to do the same, it is impossible for a person to swim through the gold as it forms a hard floor-like surface and diving in to it would be like diving into a concrete floor.

Rick from Casablanca. When his nationality is questioned by the Nazis, he replies “I’m a drunkard.” How can you top that, when it comes to an appropriate mentor. If I had to chose a real person involved with pop culture, I’d have loved to have been mentored by Walt Disney. The man started out with a few thousand dollars and look at the empire he built, entertaining more millions than even George Lucas (I actually met and shook hands with Walt Disney when I was 8). George Lucas is just about the only person since Walt Disney to bootstrap himself up from nearly nothing to owning a globally spanning media empire, so it’s sort of ironic that Lucas would end up selling out to Disney in the end.

Speaking of Yoda training Luke, that’s the major plot hole with Return of the Jedi. The story lines diverge after they leave Hoth, with only a few days passing for Luke while the rest of the crew enduring a journey to “pretty far” Bespin without hyperdrive – a voyage that would have taken months or even years at sub-light speeds – and then when Luke flies to Bespin the timelines magically match up with no apparent discontinuity. The only reasonable explanation is that Luke had to have trained for the months it took for the Falcon to reach Bespin. When you stop to think about it, George Lucas was a pretty sloppy storyteller, letting huge plot holes that that get by unnoticed. By the time he made the prequel trilogy, he’d even forgotten that in the previous movies he’d invented his own Star Wars slang “You look strong enough to pull the ears off a gondark” and began using earth slang instead. Sitting ducks, indeed! Why not a nesting womp rat, instead? And lets not forget the blunder of Leia having memories of her mother and then having Padme die in childbirth. I guess, like Scrooge McDuck, Lucas was too busy swimming in his rivers of gold to pay attention to details.

Don’t get me wrong – I really like the Star Wars movies, but the more I watch them, the more the apparent blunders take me out of the story whenever they occur.

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